Harrison Squared (7 page)

The others at the table looked like they were ignoring me, and I tried to look like I was ignoring them, but I was watching their fingers tap, flick, cross, and uncross. I didn't know what the individual movements meant, but I could follow the flow of conversation. The talk was rippling across the table. All the while, their expressions never changed.

Lydia arrived at the table. She did something with one finger, and the rest of the students picked up their trays and left without a word. She sat down opposite me.

“Wow,” I said. “What did you say?”

“You're never going to learn fingercant,” Lydia said. “We've been doing it since kindergarten, and you're an outsider.”

“Fingercant. Cool. What's being an outsider got to do with it?”

“You'll be leaving Dunnsmouth before you ever learn.”

“I'm good with languages,” I said. “Give me a try.
Por favor.
”

She rolled her eyes. On Lydia, this was a major muscle movement.

“This is ‘be quiet,'” she said. She twitched the pinky of her right hand, twice. “This is ‘the teacher's watching.'” She bent the knuckle of her index finger, then pointed it straight.

“Okay, right.” I practiced it: pinky twitch, pinky twitch, index bend, point.

Lydia said, “You just said, ‘punch me in the back of the head.'”

“I did?”

Lydia blinked, very slowly.

“Oh,” I said. “You know, it's very hard to tell when you're joking.”

She stared at me.

“You are joking, right?”

“Don't use it in class,” Lydia said. “You're too obvious. If you get caught, Montooth will punish you. But more important…” She stood and picked up her tray. She hadn't touched the stew. “You'll ruin it for all of us.”

“Wait, you have to tell me more!”

I wanted to know what language they were speaking during Voluntary. What those symbols carved above the pool locker rooms meant. And I really wanted to know what everybody was saying literally behind my back.

Lydia walked away carrying her tray. And then I noticed the fingers of her right hand moving: pinky, pinky, index bend … point.

I looked around. Mrs. Velloc stood by one gray wall, staring at me.

*   *   *

I walked downhill to the rental place, my backpack ten pounds heavier than it was this morning because of three huge textbooks: one on government from world history class; one from English class called
Catastrophes of New England: 1650 to 1875
; and a much-used book from my last class of the day, Non-Euclidean Geometry. The class was taught by Mr. Gint, a pale, balding man who barely looked at us. The entire class period he sat at his desk with a protractor and pencil, drawing pictures and muttering to himself. The students took worksheets from a stack and did them silently at their desks, and most of them—including Lydia—turned in the sheets before they left. But the questions didn't make any sense to me. At home they still didn't. The first one was:

A fortress of solid granite, two thousand feet square, has four perfectly straight walls rising perpendicular to the level ground. You are alone. The others have abandoned you. The walls are infinitely high. Where do the tops of the walls touch? Show your work.

But walls perpendicular to flat ground would never touch. Certainly not infinite walls—whether you were alone or not. All the questions were like that, involving unlikely shapes and logical inconsistencies. I finally decided to treat the worksheet as a series of trick questions, explaining why each case was impossible. An hour later, I had finished with homework, and Mom still wasn't home.

As night fell I tried not to think about the lurker from last night. I made supper for myself. I rearranged our books on the few shelves in the living room—ignoring the spot where the Newton and Leeb collection would have gone. I stared at my useless phone. No service. My mood started to turn ugly again, but I shook myself out of it. Sometimes you have to just act normal to make the world
be
normal.

So, like a normal person, I turned off some of the lights in the house, and then—like a sane, nonparanoid person—I went to bed. I don't remember if I dreamed. But when I awoke it was morning, and sunlight was streaming through my window, and the police were knocking at the front door.

5

He went like one that hath been stunn'd,

And is of sense forlorn:

A sadder and a wiser man

He rose the morrow morn.

Your mother's been in an accident, they said. Later, I couldn't remember which cop had first broken the news, Detective Lieutenant Hammersmith or Chief Bode of the Dunnsmouth Police. Hammersmith was the squat black man with the glasses who said he'd come down from the Uxton State Police Detective Unit. Whenever he talked, or tried to lead the discussion, Bode, a white, chubby, red-faced man, would try to cut him off.

Their questions overlapped and kept me confused. When was the last time I saw my mother? Had she talked to me during the day? And the topper: Did she know how to swim?

I had only one question of my own. “Is she dead?”

Hammersmith and Bode exchanged a look.

Hammersmith grimaced. “The Coast Guard is running a search pattern with helicopters, and local fishermen are helping out,” he said. “The important thing is not to lose faith.”

Bode said, “Missing is not dead.”

I sat on the couch, folded over like I'd been gut-punched. They tried to tell me what had happened, but I was having trouble processing the information, and I had to ask them to repeat it. Sometime last night, about seven p.m., the owner of the boat Mom had chartered, a fisherman named Hal Jonsson, sent out a distress call and said they were taking on water. He gave their position as about fifteen miles from shore. After that, the radio went silent. By the time the Coast Guard got to the last known location of Jonsson's boat, there was nothing there but flotsam.

“They found some life preservers, a plastic cooler, some equipment,” Hammersmith said. “Just the things that would float. Some of it was stenciled with the boat's name.”

“I don't understand,” I said. “What happened? Was there a storm?”

“No storm,” Hammersmith said. “No bad weather, really.”

“So what happened? They hit a reef?”

“We don't know, son,” Bode said. “But we're working on it.” He shouldered his way in front of Hammersmith, and when he squatted in front of me his knees cracked loudly. He was bald except for a narrow fringe of dark hair that gripped the back of his head like a horseshoe. “In the meantime, tell us who we can contact for you. Where's your father?”

“Are you kidding me?” I said. My voice was louder than I intended. I wiped at my nose.

“Is there a reason you don't want us to contact your father?” Hammersmith asked.

They had no idea. Didn't they have records on these kinds of things? “My father died in a boating accident thirteen years ago,” I said. “I mean, he
went missing
.”

And there it was. My old friend rage. My right leg throbbed.

They waited for me to calm down.
I
waited for me to calm down.

“So…,” Bode said eventually. “How about other relatives. Anyone you can stay with?”

My relatives were all distant, either emotionally, geographically, or both. On my mom's side there were thousands of cousins, but they were all in Brazil and I'd never met them. On my dad's side were his father and his sister. Mom never got along with them, especially Selena—Aunt Sel—who was so much the polar opposite of my mother that Mom called her “Antipode.” More scientist humor.

I supposed that left only my grandfather. I opened the plastic trunk that contained my mother's research materials. I found the blue spiral notebook that served as her address book and flipped through it until I found Grandpa's entry. “Harrison Harrison the Third,” I told them. “He lives in Oregon, but he's not been well. I don't think he can travel.”

“We'll give him a call,” Hammersmith, holding out his hand.

Bode stepped up and took the address book. “Yes, we will.”

They started asking me questions about my mom's schedule, what she was doing out on the water, and then what, exactly, she was researching.

The rage I'd felt gradually slipped away—or I slipped away from it. The longer I talked the farther I moved out of my body. I watched it move, and listened to the strange noises it made, but I was somewhere else, somewhere out over the water.

*   *   *

Detective Hammersmith shook my hand with forced cheer and said he'd let me know as soon as they knew anything. Then Chief Bode drove me in his squad car up the hill, past the school. It seemed crazy that the students inside were going about their business as if nothing had happened.

The Dunnsmouth police station was one of the few brick buildings in town. Bode showed me to a small conference room, looked around, then brought me a stack of old issues of
Rod and Gun Magazine
. I stared at the pile without opening one.

A half hour or so later, Bode returned with a burly, round-faced white woman. “This is Mrs. Llewellyn,” Bode said. “She's from the Department of Children and Families, up in Uxton.”

“Call me Marjorie,” she said in a thick New England accent. Her name came out “MAH-jree”—two syllables. “If you were a year older you'd be on your own, but since you're sixteen—well, that puts you under the ‘children' part of my job.” As for what, exactly, that job was in my case, she said she was here to answer my questions and generally help out until a parent or guardian could take over.

“Is there anything you need right now?” she asked. “Have you had breakfast yet?”

“I'm not hungry,” I said.

“How about something to drink?”

“I'm fine,” I said.

“Well I'm starving. Walk me to the vending machine?”

Bode opened the door for us. “I'll leave you two to it.”

Marjorie walked me down a hallway. “That's a pissa about your mother. You holdin' up?”

“I'm fine,” I said. Then realized how stupid that sounded. Who would be fine in a situation like this? “I'm worried,” I said.

“Course you are.” She led me into what looked like the cops' break room. There was no one else there. From one machine she purchased a package of little chocolate donuts, and from the other a couple of cans of soda. Perfect components to assemble a sugar bomb. She handed one of the bottles to me without asking me if I wanted it. “My cousin got pulled out of the drink a couple years ago,” she said. “Freezing water. Should have been dead. But they found him, resuscitated him, and now he's back to being a pain in the ass.”

“You don't have to do that,” I said. “Give me false hope.”

“This is regular, standard-issue hope,” she said. “Your mom's an ocean scientist right? Out on the water a lot? So she's experienced.”

We sat at one of the round Formica tables. “She's a marine biologist,” I said. “She was putting out research buoys that take sonar pictures and upload them to NOAA satellites whenever they hear something really big.”

“Noah?”

“National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. She got a grant from them to track squids, especially this one species, the colossal squid.”

“That sounds scary.” Marjorie popped a donut into her mouth.

“They just look scary,” I said, with false bravado. They kinda freaked me out. Not as bad as the fish boy did, though. I hadn't told the cops about him; how could I?
By the way, a were-trout came to my house last night and stole my favorite book.
They'd lock me away. “There's very little evidence that they come this far north, but that's what she was trying to prove.”

“Yeah, well…” Marjorie bit into a donut, then turned the mouth of the package in my direction. I took one. She said, “There's all kinds of stuff down there we haven't seen yet, right?”

Chief Bode came into the room. He went to the phone on the table, punched a button, then handed it to me. He wore a pained expression. “It's for you.”

I took the phone. “Hello?”

“Harry! What the hell happened? What do they mean her boat's
lost
?”

“Grandpa?”

“What in God's name are you doing in Massachusetts?”

“It's complicated. We came here to do research, and—”

“I told you never to go back. Why would you go back?”

My grandfather was yelling into the phone. Maybe he couldn't hear me. Or maybe he'd forgotten that when you asked a question it was traditional to wait for an answer. He was old. Not Regular Grandparent old—Historical Monument old. The last time we'd seen him, three years ago at what Mom and I later started calling the Infamous Last Christmas, he'd been cranky and irritable. The visit had ended in shouting, and we hadn't been back since.

“Is there not enough tragedy in this family?” he said.

“Grandpa, please. Could you settle down? I need your help.”

That finally got him to pause. After a moment he said, “Is it the boy?”

“What boy?”

“Your son, of course! Tell me nothing's happened to him.”

Oh no. I let the phone drop to my side. My grandfather was still asking questions at high volume. Finally I lifted the receiver and said, “He's fine, Grandpa. Everyone's fine. I'll talk to you later, okay?”

Chief Bode took the phone from me with a questioning expression.

“He thinks he's talking to his dead son,” I said.

“How old is he?” the chief asked.

“He's in his nineties.” My dad, if he was alive now, would be in his fifties. Everybody on my dad's side of the family puts off babies as long as possible, creating generation gaps as big as the Grand Canyon. The Grandparent Canyon.